Finding My FaithAnonymous

Personal statement for the common application.

A year and a day’s journey lay ahead of every fabled knight in search of the ever elusive Holy Grail, and if said knight was deemed worthy to find it, exhaustion would cause him to sleep at the feet of the Grail without ever truly seeing it. And while medieval grail legends are fiction, to this day people argue about the grail’s true nature. Most recently, Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code put the limelight back on the ‘alternative’ history as portrayed by Gnostic Gospels and guess work. In retaliation, the orthodoxy condemned the book, and sparked an interest in the matter that consumed an entire summer of private research. From my late nights of reading, I just became entirely lost in what was fiction and what wasn’t; but I did tend to side with the less spoken for side of the story.

Part of the reason why I like the controversy of alternative history is that I don’t approve of the organized manifestation of religion, churches. It is clear to me that the root of the problem is that in order to keep multitudes of people believing the same thing, the powers that be have to be strict about conformity to the message. But something gets in the way of that, it’s commonly called personal faith. When enough people’s personals...